Setting Up Tracked Prompts

Every scan asks AI engines a set of questions and analyses the answers. Out of the box those questions are generated for you from the project’s brand, industry and competitors. That is fine for a first scan and wrong for a serious programme, because the questions your buyers actually type are specific to your market and nobody can infer them from a domain name.

Tracked Prompts is where you take that over. It lives in the Monitor group of the sidebar, subtitled “Define the buyer-intent queries your brand is monitored against”.

Step 1: Understand what tracking a prompt changes

The explainer card at the top of the page states the rule, and it is a replacement rather than an addition: when a project has active tracked prompts, scans query the engines with exactly those. Leave the list empty — or switch every prompt off — and scans fall back to the auto-generated discovery prompts. There is no blended mode.

Write prompts the way your buyers actually ask, not the way you would phrase a keyword. Google’s own guidance on AI features makes the same point from the other side: these surfaces answer conversational, intent-bearing questions rather than matching terse strings, so “what’s the best project management tool for a remote design team” is a far more useful thing to monitor than “project management software”.

The card also carries a badge showing how many prompts are currently active, and a note about cost: each scan runs engines × prompts queries. Seven engines and ten active prompts is seventy queries per scan, and that is what counts against your plan’s monthly query allowance. More prompts means more coverage and more usage, in a straight line.

Step 2: Discover a starting set

You do not have to start from a blank page. The Discover prompts card runs an AI pass over your project that proposes the buyer-intent questions your market asks, clusters them into topics, and estimates monthly volume for each. Click Discover prompts and the work happens in a background job; a toast tells you it has started, or that a run is already in progress.

Discovery is limited to one run per project per hour, so repeat clicks collapse onto the run already going rather than re-spending on the same work. Viewers cannot start one — the role bar is member and above, as with everything that spends AI credits.

When it finishes, two things change on the page. Topic chips appear under the card, each showing how many prompts fall in that cluster and their combined monthly volume. And new suggestions land in your prompt list inactive, which is deliberate: discovery proposes, you decide. Nothing starts consuming query budget because a job ran overnight.

Volumes come from a real keyword-volume provider when one is configured for the deployment, and from the model’s own coarse estimate when it is not. Treat them as ordering information — the relative ranking is what you use — rather than as precise search counts.

Step 3: Add the prompts discovery will not think of

Under Add a prompt, type the question and press Enter or click Add prompt. The placeholder shows the register that works: best project management tool for startups — a real question in a buyer’s words, not a keyword.

Write them as a person would ask an assistant. “Best CRM for a five-person sales team” beats “CRM software” because it is what someone actually types into a chat box, and because the answer will name a shortlist you can be on or absent from. Cover the shapes that matter commercially: category questions (“best X for Y”), comparison questions (“X vs Y”), alternative questions (“alternatives to competitor”), and objection questions (“is X worth it for Z”).

If you re-add something you already track, the page refuses with “That prompt is already tracked” rather than creating a duplicate that would quietly double its cost.

Step 4: Activate only what you will act on

Each row in Your prompts has a toggle on the left. Active prompts run in scans; inactive ones sit in the list costing nothing. The row shows the prompt text, whether it is active, when it was created, and — for discovered prompts — a topic badge, a monthly volume figure and a priority badge.

The pencil icon edits the text in place (Enter saves, Escape cancels). The bin icon removes the prompt after a confirmation dialog that spells out the consequence: it will no longer be used in scans for this project.

Curate ruthlessly. A prompt you would not change your content over is a prompt that is spending query budget to produce a row you scroll past.

Step 5: Know the two different limits

This is where people get surprised, because there are two numbers and they are not the same.

Active prompts you may store is a per-plan cap: 5 on free, 25 on Team, 50 on Business, 100 on Agency. It is enforced when you add a prompt and again when you switch an inactive one on, and it answers with an explicit message — “The team plan allows 25 active prompts. Deactivate one, or upgrade to track more.” The check is atomic, so two people activating prompts at the same moment cannot both slip past the cap.

Prompts one scan runs is a lower, separate cap: 5 on free, 10 on Team, 15 on Business, 20 on Agency. If you hold more active prompts than that, a scan runs the first N in creation order — oldest first — and does not touch the rest.

The gap between the two is intentional (storing a research list you rotate through is useful), but it means the order you create prompts in has consequences. If your ten most important questions were added last, they are the ones a Team-plan scan will skip. When a prompt genuinely matters more, remove and re-add the ones you care less about so the important ones sit earlier in the list, or deactivate the surplus outright.

Step 6: Maintain the list

Tracked prompts are not a set-and-forget setting. Three habits keep them honest:

• Re-run discovery periodically. New suggestions arrive inactive, so a run is safe; you review the topic chips and pull in anything the market started asking that you were not watching.
• Watch the query maths before you expand. Adding five prompts across seven engines adds 35 queries per scan, every scan, on whatever cadence your plan runs.
• Retire prompts that stopped teaching you anything. A question you have ranked first on for six months is confirmation, not information.

Deactivating everything is a legitimate state, not a broken one: the project simply returns to auto-generated discovery prompts, which is the right setting for a domain you are only watching — a competitor, say — rather than actively optimising.

Step 7: Where to go next

• Prompt monitoring strategy — how to choose a prompt set that stays useful over quarters, not weeks.
• Finding AEO queries — research methods for the questions discovery will not surface on its own.
• Multi-engine monitoring — the other half of the engines × prompts equation.
• Understanding Answer Engine Rankings — what the scans do with the prompts once you have chosen them.